A data storage system is an arrangement of hardware and software that typically includes one or more storage processors coupled to an array of non-volatile data storage devices, such as magnetic disk drives, electronic flash drives, and/or optical drives. The storage processors service host input/output (I/O) operations received from host machines. The received I/O operations specify storage objects (e.g. logical disks or “LUNs”) that are to be written to, read from, created, or deleted. The storage processors run software that manages incoming I/O operations and that performs various data processing tasks to organize and secure the host data received from the host machines and stored on the non-volatile data storage devices
In order to reduce host and network overhead, certain operations may be offloaded to the data storage system. For example, Windows-based XCOPY Lite and VMware vSphere® Storage APIs—Array Integration (VAAI) XCOPY allow a host to instruct the data storage system to transfer data from one location on the data storage system to another location on the data storage system without transferring the data to the host over the network.